Many confectionaries are coated with a flavored candy coating. The coating helps to preserve the confectionary, imparts a desired eye-appeal and adds flavor. Bakery produced cakes, ice cream bars and popsicles, candy pieces and candy bars are conventionally coated with such flavored coatings. While these coatings can be flavored with any desired natural or artificial flavor, they are most often flavored with cocoa or chocolate liquor to form a chocolate flavored coating.
Chocolate coatings can be produced in the traditional way of making milk chocolate. This process, however, requires a rather expensive ingredient, i.e., cocoa butter. For this reason and for other reasons, milk chocolate candy coatings are relatively expensive and are not used on popularly priced confectionaries and in lieu thereof a compound coating is used. Compound coatings do not require a cooking step and are, generally speaking, simply a mechanical mixture of principally cocoa, sugar and fat.
As can be appreciated, the solid ingredients and the fat of a compound coating must be so intimately mixed that the texture, mouth feel and taste of the compound coating will approximate that of milk chocolate. The process wherein these ingredients are mixed to that required extent is referred to in the art as the conching step. As is well known in the art, conching must pulverize the sugar, cocoa and other ingredients to the point that the compound coating has no "gritty" texture or mouth feel and to the extent that the cocoa is mechanically worked into the fat.
Traditionally, the conching step takes place on a "concher" which operates with rolling pressure to slowly grind and pulverize the sugar, cocoa and other ingredients into the fat.
Also, during the conching step, the moisture content of the ingredients is reduced to very low levels, i.e., to 3% or less and more often to 0.5 percent or less. Water sensitive emulsifiers, such as lecithin, are usually added near the end of the conching step when the moisture content has been reduced to the range of these lower levels.
The time required to complete a conching step of the foregoing nature will depend upon the quality of the compound coating desired. For better compound coatings up to 80 to 85 hours on the concher are required and even for the very poor and generally unacceptable grades of compound coatings, at least 8 hours will be required. The conching operation requires extended amounts of power and extended use of relatively expensive capital equipment.
The patents to Zicarelli, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,017,645 and 4,042,721, teach a method of making a chocolate coating for confectionary purposes, which method considerably reduces the conventional conching times hitherto considered necessary. Zicarelli requires the use of relatively short conching periods but at high temperature conditions, i.e., above 150.degree. F. for a critically short period of time of about 30 seconds or less. Obviously, Zicarelli does not eliminate the conching step, and the heavy capital and energy outlay associated therewith. Further, Zicarelli's method introduces a possible problem of deterioration of fats or cocoa or other flavorings used due to overheating. The Zicarelli patents represent the most pertinent art known to the applicant.
It is a major object of this invention to completely eliminate the need for conching of a confectionary coating--and to accomplish this by means of careful selection of the ingredients of the final coating. It is a further object of this invention to provide a coating which can truly be designated as a "health food" coating in that relatively high protein ingredients are employed, sucrose sugar is preferably not added to the formulation, the formulation is cholesterol-free, caffeine-free and of relatively low caloric content.